Study: Extreme Weather to Increase, Doubling Economic Losses by 2050

Extreme weather events like Superstorm Sandy can cost lives and billions of dollars in damages.

Over at Oak Ridge National Labs, Katie Elyce Freeman writes that simulations show that losses from extreme weather damage could double by 2050.

A side effect of America’s growth has been the tendency to put more people, infrastructure and assets in harm’s way, and when a storm comes through, that increased exposure drives up economic losses,” said author Benjamin Preston, deputy director of ORNL’s Climate Change Science Institute, who studied historical data from more than 3,000 U.S. counties and used predictive modeling in the assessment.

Preston projected that current annual U.S. disaster losses of $10 billion to $13 billion could increase by a factor of 1.8 to 3.9 by 2050. Read the Full Story.

Resource Links:

Latest Video

Industry Perspectives

"Exascale computers are going to deliver only one or two per cent of their theoretical peak performance when they run real applications; and both the people paying for, and the people using, such machines need to have realistic expectations about just how low a percentage of the peak performance they will obtain." [Read More...]